In recent weeks I've written
about U.S. President Barack Obama's bluff on Syria and the tightrope he is now
walking on military intervention. There is another bluff going on that has to
be understood, this one from Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Putin is bluffing that Russia
has emerged as a major world power. In reality, Russia is merely a regional
power, but mainly because its periphery is in shambles. He has tried to project
a strength that that he doesn't have, and he has done it well. For him, Syria
poses a problem because the United States is about to call his bluff, and he is
not holding strong cards. To understand his game we need to start with the
recent G-20 meeting in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Putin and Obama held a
20-minute meeting there that appeared to be cold and inconclusive. The United
States seems to be committed to some undefined military action in Syria, and
the Russians are vehemently opposed. The tensions showcased at the G-20 between
Washington and Moscow rekindled memories of the Cold War, a time when Russia
was a global power. And that is precisely the mood Putin wanted to create.
That's where Putin's bluff begins.
A Humbled Global Power
The United States and Russia have
had tense relations for quite a while. Early in the Obama administration,
then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton showed up in Moscow carrying a box with
a red button, calling it the reset button. She said that it was meant to
symbolize the desire for restarting U.S.-Russian relations. The gesture had
little impact, and relations have deteriorated since then. With China focused
on its domestic issues and with Europe in disarray, the United States and
Russia are the two major -- if not comparable -- global players, and the
deterioration in relations can be significant. We need to understand what is
going on here before we think about Syria.
Twenty years ago, the United
States had little interest in relations with Russia, and certainly not with
resetting them. The Soviet Union had collapsed, the Russian Federation was in
ruins and it was not taken seriously by the United States -- or anywhere else
for that matter. The Russians recall this period with bitterness. In their
view, under the guise of teaching the Russians how to create a constitutional
democracy and fostering human rights, the United States and Europe had engaged
in exploitative business practices and supported non-governmental organizations
that wanted to destabilize Russia.
The breaking point came during
the Kosovo crisis. Slobodan Milosevic, leader of what was left of Yugoslavia,
was a Russian ally. Russia had a historic relationship with Serbia, and it did
not want to see Serbia dismembered, with Kosovo made independent.
There were three reasons for
this. First, the Russians denied that there was a massacre of Albanians in
Kosovo. There had been a massacre by Serbians in Bosnia; the evidence of a
massacre in Kosovo was not clear and is still far from clear. Second, the
Russians did not want European borders to change. There had been a general
agreement that forced changes in borders should not happen in Europe, given its
history, and the Russians were concerned that restive parts of the Russian
Federation, from Chechnya to Karelia to Pacific Russia, might use the forced
separation of Serbia and Kosovo as a precedent for dismembering Russia. In
fact, they suspected that was the point of Kosovo. Third, and most important,
they felt that an attack without U.N. approval and without Russian support
should not be undertaken both under international law and out of respect for
Russia.
President Bill Clinton and
some NATO allies went to war nevertheless. After two months of airstrikes that
achieved little, they reached out to the Russians to help settle the conflict.
The Russian emissary reached an agreement that accepted the informal separation
of Kosovo from Serbia but would deploy Russian peacekeepers along with the U.S.
and European ones, their mission being to protect the Serbians in Kosovo. The
cease-fire was called, but the part about Russian peacekeepers was never fully
implemented.
Russia felt it deserved more
deference on Kosovo, but it couldn't have expected much more given its weak
geopolitical position at the time. However, the incident served as a catalyst
for Russia's leadership to try to halt the country's decline and regain its
respect. Kosovo was one of the many reasons that Vladimir Putin became
president, and with him, the full power of the intelligence services he rose
from were restored to their former pre-eminence.
Western Encroachment
The United States has supported,
financially and otherwise, the proliferation of human rights groups in the
former Soviet Union. When many former Soviet countries experienced revolutions
in the 1990s that created governments that were somewhat more democratic but
certainly more pro-Western and pro-American, Russia saw the West closing in.
The turning point came in Ukraine, where the Orange Revolution generated what
seemed to Putin a pro-Western government in 2004. Ukraine was the one country
that, if it joined NATO, would make Russia indefensible and would control many
of its pipelines to Europe.
In Putin's view, the
non-governmental organizations helped engineer this, and he claimed that U.S.
and British intelligence services funded those organizations. To Putin, the
actions in Ukraine indicated that the United States in particular was committed
to extending the collapse of the Soviet Union to a collapse of the Russian
Federation. Kosovo was an insult from his point of view. The Orange Revolution
was an attack on basic Russian interests.
Putin began a process of
suppressing all dissent in Russia, both from foreign-supported non-governmental
organizations and from purely domestic groups. He saw Russia as under attack,
and he saw these groups as subversive organizations. There was an argument to
be made for this. But the truth was that Russia was returning to its historical
roots as an authoritarian government, with the state controlling the direction
of the economy and where dissent is treated as if it were meant to destroy the
state. Even though much of this reaction could be understood given the failures
and disasters since 1991, it created a conflict with the United States. The
United States kept pressing on the human rights issue, and the Russians became
more repressive in response.
Then came the second act of
Kosovo. In 2008, the Europeans decided to make Kosovo fully independent. The
Russians asked that this not happen and said that the change had little
practical meaning anyway. From the Russian point of view, there was no reason to
taunt Russia with this action. The Europeans were indifferent.
The Russians found an
opportunity to respond to the slight later that year in Georgia. Precisely how
the Russo-Georgian war began is another story, but it resulted in Russian tanks
entering a U.S. client state, defeating its army and remaining there until they
were ready to leave. With the Americans bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, no
intervention was possible. The Russians took this as an opportunity to deliver
two messages to Kiev and other former Soviet states. First, Russia,
conventional wisdom aside, could and would use military power when it chose.
Second, he invited Ukraine and other countries to consider what an American
guarantee meant.
U.S.-Russian relations never
really recovered. From the U.S. point of view, the Russo-Georgia war was naked
aggression. From the Russian point of view, it was simply the Russian version
of Kosovo, in fact gentler in that it left Georgia proper intact. The United
States became more cautious in funding non-governmental organizations. The
Russians became more repressive by the year in their treatment of dissident
groups.
Since 2008, Putin has
attempted to create a sense that Russia has returned to its former historic
power. It maintains global relations with left-wing powers such as Venezuela,
Ecuador, Bolivia and Cuba. Of course, technically Russia is not left wing, and
if it is, it is a weird leftism given its numerous oligarchs who still prosper.
And in fact there is little that Russia can do for any of those countries,
beyond promising energy investments and weapon transfers that only occasionally
materialize. Still, it gives Russia a sense of global power.
In fact, Russia remains a
shadow of what the Soviet Union was. Its economy is heavily focused on energy
exports and depends on high prices it cannot control. Outside Moscow and St.
Petersburg, life remains hard and life expectancy short. Militarily, it cannot
possibly match the United States. But at this moment in history, with the
United States withdrawing from deep involvement in the Muslim world, and with
the Europeans in institutional disarray, it exerts a level of power in excess
of its real capacity. The Russians have been playing their own bluff, and this
bluff helps domestically by creating a sense that, despite its problems, Russia
has returned to greatness.
In this game, taking on and
besting the United States at something, regardless of its importance, is
critical. The Snowden matter was perfect for the Russians. Whether they were
involved in the Snowden affair from the beginning or entered later is
unimportant. It has created two important impressions. The first is that Russia
is still capable of wounding the United States -- a view held among those who
believe the Russians set the affair in motion, and a view quietly and
informally encouraged by those who saw this as a Russian intelligence coup even
though they publicly and heartily denied it.
The second impression was that
the United States was being hypocritical. The United States had often accused
the Russians of violating human rights, but with Snowden, the Russians were in
a position where they protected the man who had revealed what many saw as a
massive violation of human rights. It humiliated the Americans in terms of
their own lax security and furthermore weakened the ability of the United
States to reproach Russia for human rights violations.
Obama was furious with
Russia's involvement in the Snowden case and canceled a summit with Putin. But
now that the United States is considering a strike on the Syrian regime
following its suspected use of chemical weapons, Washington may be in a
position to deal a setback to a Russia client state, and by extension, Moscow
itself.
The Syria Question
The al Assad regime's
relations with Russia go back to 1970, when Hafez al Assad, current President
Bashar al Assad's father, staged a coup and aligned Syria with the Soviet
Union. In the illusion of global power that Putin needs to create, the fall of
al Assad would undermine his strategy tremendously unless the United States was
drawn into yet another prolonged and expensive conflict in the Middle East. In
the past, the U.S. distraction with Iraq and Afghanistan served Russia's
interests. But the United States is not very likely to get as deeply involved
in Syria as it did in those countries. Obama might bring down the regime and
create a Sunni government of unknown beliefs, or he may opt for a casual cruise
missile attack. But this will not turn into Iraq unless Obama loses control
completely.
This could cause Russia to
suffer a humiliation similar to the one it dealt the United States in 2008 with
Georgia. The United States will demonstrate that Russia's concerns are of no
account and that Russia has no counters if and when the United States decides
to act.
The impact inside Russia will
be interesting. There is some evidence of weakness in Putin's position. His
greatest strength has been to create the illusion of Russia as an emerging
global power. This will deal that a blow, and how it resonates through the
Russian system is unclear. But in any event, it could change the view of Russia
being on the offensive and the United States being on the defensive.
Putin made this a core issue
for him. I don't think he expected the Europeans to take the position that al
Assad had used chemical weapons. He thought he had more pull than that. He
didn't. The Europeans may not fly missions but they are not in a position to
morally condemn those who do. That means that Putin's bluff is in danger.
History will not turn on this
event, and Putin's future, let alone Russia's, does not depend on his ability
to protect Russia's Syrian ally. Syria just isn't that important. There are
many reasons that the United States might not wish to engage in Syria. But if
we are to understand the U.S.-Russian crisis over Syria, it makes sense to
consider the crisis within in the arc of recent history from Kosovo in 1999 to
Georgia in 2008 to where we are today.
George Friedman, "Syria, America and Putin's Bluff is republished with permission of Stratfor."
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